Aspectual Coercion and the Complementation of Aspectualizers in English
Aspectual Coercion and the Complementation of Aspectualizers in English

Summary/Abstract: In the paper I intend to give an insight into the phenomenon of coercion and how this is manifested in the case of aspectualizers in English. The phenomenon of coercion plays an important role in aspectual complementation, and as such also in the complementation of aspectualizers whenever there is a clash between the aspectual category of an aspectualizer and that of the complement verb. I will give examples of coercion by aspectualizers describing the beginning of an event (‘begin’,‘start’), continuation (‘continue’,‘ keep’,‘go on’), and also final part of a situation (‘end’,‘finish’)—also pointing to cases where aspectual complementation lacks the phenomenon of coercion. Coercion often leads to ambiguous sentences; in order to disambiguate the meaning of such constructions it is also necessary to apply to some extra-linguistic world knowledge in addition to a semantic analysis.

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